It’s colder’n a well digger’s ass in the Klondike.  Me and Swede hopped this freight car about an hour ago in Minneapolis.  We think it’s going to Milwaukee.  At least we hope it is.  With any kind of luck, we could be in New Orleans by the end of next week.  I told Swede that since we were going to be hungry and homeless, we didn’t have to be cold, too.  So that’s when we both figured on going south, which is the way we’re headin’ now.  Yesterday afternoon at the Thanksgiving dinner table, I took a Louisville Slugger to that Polack son of a bitch my mother married about two years after she packed us up and moved away from Pop, which was when he walked out the door on his way to a pool game in some joint down on Lyndale Avenue.  I remem­ber how good a player he was.  I guess I inherited it from him.  I’m a pretty good shot my­self.  Once I peaked through the window of some joint, and it was at that exact moment that he was run­ning the table in a game of straight pool.  God he was swell!

            He was off to a pool game the day Ma left him.  He was leaving the house, and she told him that her, my sis­ter and me wouldn’t be there when he got home, but I guess he didn’t believe her because he went to the pool hall anyway.  I barely remember the event; it’s only the shadow of a memory from my childhood now, kept there by my sister who repeat­ed the story over and over again.  This was actu­ally one of the more colorful stories she told about Pop, not one de­signed to make me feel guilty, which, I think, was her purpose most of the time when she talked about him to me.  But when she told this story, a flicker of pride crossed her face as she described his swagger, saying it made him ap­pear a lot bigger than he actually was.  She said he looked dashing with his derby hat cocked to one side, strutting down the alley that last time, disappear­ing around the cor­ner as soon as he reached the street.  At that same time Sis says Ma was telling her to start getting our stuff to­gether.  We were moving to a dif­ferent place and wouldn’t be seeing too much of my father anymore.

            Two years later, my mother met and married this little Polish tight wad.  I guess she had a thing for little guys, but size was the only thing that fuckin’ moron had in common with my father.  Pop was a happy-go-lucky kind of guy who could talk to anybody.  Just get a couple belts in him, and he was right at home in any company.  If he had a couple bucks, he’d lose ’em or give ’em away in a minute.  That was another reason why my mother left him.  She thought he should take care of his family first.  She was right.  He used to al­ways bring me and my sister little presents and things, and he was usually kind to my mother, but he was com­pletely irre­sponsible.  He was probably the last person in the world to ever have a wife and kids and responsibilities, but somehow he was dealt that hand, and I guess you could say in the end he had to fold.

            So, my mother married this hard-ass little Polack, who’s so goddamn tight he squeaks.  And he’s got this little-man complex, so he’s always kind of belligerent.  He’s toughest on me, and then my ma. He never lays a hand on my sis.  He doesn’t physically beat my ma either; it’s more a mental thing.  But he’s always got an excuse to hit me and  beat me up.  I guess he thinks it isn’t right to hit women, but men are okay, no matter how young or old they are.  Well, something happened as the years passed.  I started getting bigger and stronger and I was learning how to fight back.  We’re both about the same size now, but I’m getting to be a better fighter than him.  I guess I re­ally didn’t need to use the baseball bat.  I’m al­ready strong enough and big enough and wiry enough to go to fist city with him and take him, too, but I just got so goddamn pissed off at the little asshole that I went nuts, just for a minute, and put him down for the count with the bat.

            The scariest part is I don’t know if I killed the son of a bitch or not.  Not scary because I might be guilty of mur­der or manslaughter, but scary because it would break my ma’s heart if I did, and scary just the thought of killing another person.   I mean, I killed plenty of squirrels with a slingshot before, but I don’t know about killing a man.  That’s different.  All I could think of was how tired I was of him beating on us all the time.  His re­lationship with my sister Megan seemed kind of twisted to me.  He always treated her like I think he should have been treating my ma.  I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think there’s anything queer going on between ’em.  Well, if there is and I killed him, there won’t be from now on.

            Last night in the train yard, we met James, who took a liking to us right away and told us about this train going to Milwaukee today.  He told us to stick with him and he’d show us how to hop onto a moving boxcar.  We joined him at a campfire with two other fella’s.  None of us had much for food.  When I ran out of the house leaving Megan and Ma crying over that old cheap skate, I grabbed a bag of the doughnuts Ma makes every day.  She makes ’em and I roam the streets sellin’ ’em.  Well, I grabbed a bag before I ran out of the house, and Swede managed to get a hold of a half a loaf of bread when he left his house.  One of the other men had stolen a can of Campbell’s tomato soup which was heated in an old coffee can over the open campfire.  With the soup and doughnuts and bread, the five of us man­aged to have a pretty good meal.  After we ate, James played his mouth organ, and its strains were ever so comforting in a forlorn and melancholy way.  Right now I’m kind of sad and lonely and I’m not alone.  By no later than nine o’clock we were huddled together in the cold Min­neapolis night and sleeping around the well-stoked fire.  It was freezing cold, and I was glad we were go’n’a be headin’ south, and for the first time in my life, I was go’n’a be someplace in the winter and there wouldn’t be any snow on the ground.

            A few minutes before dawn James was stirring the hot coals of the fire and throwing the last pieces of wood on so we could have a fire to warm up some water for coffee when the sun came up.  He said that a Chicago bound freight would be leaving at nine o’clock.  We wanted to be on it, but we had to keep a keen eye out to make sure we didn’t get pinched by the railroad dicks who are always trying throw guys off the trains.  By the time the sun broke over the horizon, all of us who had slept by our campfire were awake and gathering our stuff together.

            There were still four doughnuts left in the bag.  Be­fore I left the house, I took the wool army blanket off my bed and rolled an extra pair of trousers and a shirt up in it and tied it with an old piece of clothes line.  This was my traveling baggage.  I split two of the doughnuts five ways and rolled the other two in their bag into the bedroll with my other things.  I gave one piece each to Swede, James and the other two fella’s at our campfire, and had the last piece for myself.  We ate them with hot coffee in old tin soup cans which also warmed our hands on that freezing November morning.  It’s a good thing the sun came out.  It’s actually turned out to be a fairly warm day.  It was full above the eastern horizon by eight o’clock, and by nine o’clock we were hopping this freight heading for Chicago.  It’ll probably be stopping in Milwaukee first.

            The last sign I saw on a station was Winona.  So far we’ve been lucky not to get rousted by any railroad bulls.  The most uncomfortable part has been the freezing cold in this boxcar.  Everybody in here is afraid to build a fire because the smoke will only bring the bulls down on us.  Me and Swede are wrapped up in our blankets and we’ve got James in between us.  It’s better’n nothin’, but it’s still cold.  It’s a good thing James is with us be­cause some of these other fella’s look like they’d try takin’ our blankets if all they had to deal with to get them was a couple teenage boys.  They see James with us and they keep their distance.

            I guess we’ll be sticking with James for quite a while.  He’s goin’ where we’re goin’, and for the same reason¾he wants to get warm too, plus he wants to find his ex-wife, and she’s out on the west coast.  He was married and him and his wife were pretty well off until the Crash when he lost his job and couldn’t keep her in the style she was used to, so she left him and ran off to Hollywood with some big shot producer.  He said she got a couple roles in B movies that didn’t go any­where in the theaters, but the last he heard, she was still out there and doing pretty good.  He even has it half way in his head that he’s go’n’a go all the way out there and look her up.  If he does, I guess we’ll be sticking with him all the way.  Our goal is to get to a place called Seal Beach, which is someplace out in southern California; I’m still not sure where.  Swede knows.  He’s got an aunt living there.  If she’ll have us, we plan to stay with her until we get jobs and then we’ll get our own place.  James says that when we get to Milwaukee, we’re proba­bly go’n’a have to get off before we get to town and walk ahead and catch the train at the other end going out.  The word is that this train’s go’n’a lay over in Milwaukee for a couple hours.  That should give us time to make it to the other end and catch it to Chicago.

            I guess I’ll be riding these rails for who knows how long not knowing whether the Polack is dead or whether I only put him on queer street for a while.  It’s probably not such a swell idea that it happened on Thanksgiving, but god­damn it, I was tired of the abuse.  You can only go so long always getting the fat and gristle, and we were dirt poor¾I guess you could say we were asphalt and concrete poor since we were living in the city.  My stepdad had been out of work since the stock market crashed two years ago.  My mother made swell doughnuts, so she’d make up ten dozen or so, and then I’d peddle ’em around town, get­ting around by sneaking on the back of streetcars, getting a nickel a dozen.  That was always worth a couple bucks a day, which was more’n we were getting from Wiktor.  Megan took in washing and ironing and made a couple bucks a day that way.  It was hard times, and we were lucky to be getting that much.

            So the three of us are busting our asses trying to make some dough, and when we do and Ma buys some meat, the old man takes the lean and gives us the gristle.  Well, Thanks­giving rolled around, and we got an early chill out of the north, and we had to get extra coal before the end of the month because it was so goddamn cold, and there’s just gen­erally bad times all around.  We were even cutting the milk with water so that it would go far­ther.  Ma got this small ham for Thanksgiving dinner, and there wasn’t much lean on it.  There was quite a bit of fat, but it was all we could af­ford.  My stepdad takes and cuts the fat off the ham, and divides it up three ways for Ma, Megan and me.  Then he takes all the lean pork and starts carving it for himself.  Not that we didn’t necessarily expect something like that to happen.  He’d done it before.  I’d eaten it be­fore (I poured syrup over it so it would at least taste sweet) because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have eaten anything, and I’m a growing boy, and sometimes we’d go for days without any meat at all.  Doing it to us on Thanksgiving was the last straw.  I had enough; I couldn’t take anymore, so I got up and went over and took his plate and set it in the middle of the table and began to cut what was on it into four portions.  He got up from his chair and cuffed me up side the head, and began to take his plate back.  That was when I got the base­ball bat and just clubbed that fuckin’ jerk as hard as I could.  He went down to the floor and didn’t move.  It scared the shit outa’ me.

 
            I went over to my chest in one corner of the room (it was basically a two room bungalow with a kitchen), got some of my things out, wrapped them up in my army blanket, and hit the road.   My first thought was to head south because I wanted to get warm.  As cold as it is right now, I know it’s go’n’a be freezing or even colder, soon.  I went over to Swede’s house.  He’s been my best pal ever since we were walking home from school together one day, and four other fella’s jumped us and the two of us kicked their asses.  We became best friends after that, and we been constant pals ever since.  He helped me deliver the dough­nuts.  When he was helping me, we got business up to twenty-five dozen doughnuts a day, and my sister helped my mother with the cooking. 

            So, having my mind made up that I was leaving town, I walked over to Swede’s to say goodbye or see if he wanted to come with me.  He’s been getting the same shit at his house as I’ve been getting at mine, but his com­es from his real dad.  I often wonder if things would have been any dif­ferent if my real father was living with us in­stead of my stepdad.  Times are tough.  There’s a depres­sion on.  People are out of work, and that seems to make ’em irritable and in a bad mood all the time.  Me and Swede aren’t the only ones either; I know some other kids who’re getting beat up by their dads too.  It must be a sign of the times.  I went over to Swede’s house with my bedroll tucked under my arm.  I was wearing a pretty heavy, red and black, plaid, wool jacket.  It’s probably the only good quality thing I have to my name.  Keeping my head warm was a brown checked, eight panel, wool Donegal Newsboy.

            Swede’s family Thanksgiving ended in a fight too.  By the time I got there, he’d already left the house, and no­body knew where he was.  I knew where to find him.  I went over to the playground where we hung around on warm summer days, trying to get the girls to go off in the bushes with us.  He was there, by himself, sit­ting in the bleachers next to the ball dia­mond.  I climbed up and sat down next to him and told him about my plans to run away.  I didn’t even have to finish telling him about it be­fore he was on his feet and ready to go back to his house and get his stuff so we could get out of there together as quick as possible.  It wasn’t as easy for him to get away from his house as it was for me.  My stepdad, if he was still alive, was probably  glad to be rid of me, but I think Swede’s dad wanted to keep him around so he could beat on him some more.  He had to go back home, get his stuff, and sneak out with­out getting caught.

            He left me in the park and walked back home.  It took him about an hour, but he finally came back.  He was wearing a heavy, black, wool jacket, and a knitted, navy-blue watch cap.  He also had his things wrapped in a heavy wool blanket.  We’d be glad real soon that we had those blankets.  He pulled a letter out of the breast pocket of his jacket and showed it to me.  It was actually an empty envelope with a canceled two cent stamp on it.  It was addressed to his mother, and the return address was Ingrid Johnson with a post office box  in Seal Beach, California.  He told me that Ingrid Johnson was his aunt, his mother’s sister, and we should try to get to her place.  He said that his aunt’s always writing to his mother how warm and sunny it is where she lives.  He stuffed the envelope back inside his coat, and we started walking to the switching yard over between Washington Avenue North and the river where Plymouth Avenue crosses, and hung around a while trying to figure out what to do.  It was my idea to try to get to Chicago.  I figured it was probably the train hub of the country, and most likely there’d be a lot of traffic going out of there, especially traffic headin’ south.  If we could get to Texas, maybe we could get work on a ranch somewhere, or as rough necks in the oil fields.  To me the most important thing is to get into the warm weather. 

            So we were hanging around the switching yard trying to figure which train to hop to get to Chicago.  I’d walked by there a lot times before, and had seen men getting on and off the freight trains.  They all seemed to hang around this one spot which was at the edge of the switching yard where the trains were still going slow enough for them to jump on.  We were standing behind this group where a few stragglers walked up and down.  It was starting to get dark, which is the best time to evade the bulls who seem to appear from nowhere to roust bums and hobos traveling aim­lessly through this depres­sion, looking for work at every stop, looking for something to eat when they’re too hungry to go on.  Me and Swede have joined their ranks.  It’s scary as hell, but it’s also an adventure, and it isn’t any scarier than going back to face murder or manslaughter charges, or worse yet, to face Wiktor Sadlo.

            When we realized that it wasn’t such a smart idea to travel at night because of the cold, we wandered over to one of the campfires, and that’s when we met James.  We hit it off with him right away, and he told us to stick with him and he’d show us which train was the one we wanted.  The first thing we learned from him was that we wouldn’t be going straight to Chicago, but to Milwau­kee first and then south to Chicago, where, he promised us, we’d be able to catch a freight to just about any place in the country we wanted to go.  He said the last steady job he had was in Kansas City in twenty-nine at the time of the Crash.  Since being on the bum, he’d picked up odd jobs here and there, which mostly just paid him with a free meal.  As we sat around the fire with the other two bums, James pulled out his mouth organ and started playing some mournful music.  The music and the train whistles gave me this lonesome, melancholy feeling, and the ragged men I saw scrambling up and down the rails looking for trains to catch only made me more lonesome.
            I don’t think I’d ever felt that lonely before in my life.  This was it.  We were on our own.  We were go’n’a have to fend for ourselves¾no more mother to go home to for com­fort in time of trouble.  Of course our moth­ers couldn’t be much comfort to us anyway; they’re trying to keep their hus­bands happy and don’t really have time for our problems.  I really love my mother, and I’m already be­ginning to miss her.  The terror in her scream and in the look on her face when I left the house is already haunting me.  I want to reach out to her, to reassure her that I’ll be all right, and that this is go’n’a pass too, but I can’t do that.  Now I’m a fugitive, like the wind, and I have no idea how far I will have to run, or how long I’ll be running.